Uplift by Ken Pence

your next uplift. You also have an appointment to meet your test team.
    Test team? My uplift? What gives?
    So many questions… You need personal protection because we are entering the most dangerous portion of the planetary phase – the consolidation. Corporations, and the established powers-that-be do not take kindly to newcomers usurping their turf. You also need physical enhancements beyond what you have. Here come your people.
    There was a knock, and in walked the biggest, baddest guys – excuse me – two women too. They wore expensive looking business attire (with body armor – Corey remarked), and they seemed a bit nervous.
    Why are they nervous? I’m the one that should be nervous. I don’t know any of them, but as soon as I thought that – in flooded the files about them. Wow. Why are they nervous though?
    Richard. They’ve heard of you – lots of rumors about you, and that video ‘smuggled’ out showing you taking rounds from a pulse rifle, and a railgun would make anyone dubious about the man-eating tiger that was going to employ them – with ‘if he liked them’ as a qualification.
    I held up both hands, and announced – you are fine. You wouldn’t be here if I didn’t like you already… though you are free to walk away at any time. I will say the non-disclosure clauses will be strictly enforced – to the point of physical enforcement if need be. You will see, and hear things that you cannot let others know about. You have just finished your probationary period, and I want to welcome you personally.
    I then went to each person, and shook their hands, called them by name, and praised them on their skills. You could see the tension leaving their bodies. Mel Brown (named after his great grandfather who was Army, and SWAT) would lead the test team. He had great combative skills, dignitary protection, driving plus skills with tools – might be as good as his great grandfather. Roger Thurman was the leader of the cyber protection team. I told him I would get him up to speed in no time – he looked at me like ‘you’re gonna show me somethin’ – I laughed at his expression, and told him I would show him how to read Chinese, Russian, and Indian intelligence files without them knowing…really. He looked like I had taken him down a notch with that bit of trivia.
    “Now that we’ve gotten acquainted – this will be one of the rare times for you forty. You will be working in shifts with ten to twenty on, and twenty off duty, or training. You are salaried workers, and I don’t want to hear grumbling about overtime – we will sometimes work long hours, but ask if you need off. We will monitor whom you contact – consider everything we do as ultra top secret. I won’t ask you to punch a clock, or fill out under-time vouchers – we do the work when it needs to be done.”
    Let’s go meet my new engineering team. Corey had done exhaustive checks on every employee, and had found all types of ringers planted to get information out of my companies – everywhere. We kept some of them because having some spies we knew about would be better than having no information sources we could control as easily. We had some Chinese, Indian, French, British, Brazilian, Russian, and Nigerian spies. Some very attractive females married my engineers – I figured it would help their work having beautiful wives who showed them how loving they were. Some of those guys couldn’t have gotten the family dog to lick them without a pork chop hanging around their necks. They’d get laid by talent, and I could block them talking about secrets.
    Corey had introduced a head net of transducers that was described as a new form of transcranial direct current stimulation. We told the engineers that this net would stimulate creativity, but we’d really download alien advanced ideas that they could ‘dream up’ themselves. It gave us a limited method of direct knowledge transfer. We enhanced what they knew, and conditioned